Janet Swailes has a rare gift for expressing the qualities of the landscape through the medium of field sketching. Her astonishing expertise, honed through decades of working in and with the landscape, both as an artist and as a professional landscape architect, is evident on every page of this book. What is equally astonishing is how well she articulates and demonstrates the ways that we can all learn to use field sketching to understand and communicate our experience of the landscape in effective ways. While we might not achieve her levels of skill and artistry, the delight in this book is partly the discovery of how easy it is to develop a basic expertise that will serve us well. Whether youre an enthusiastic amateur who wants to learn how to read the landscape with greater clarity, or a professional practitioner wanting to record or communicate key information effectively and with economy of line and image, this is the book for you. Janet is a wonderful communicator, in image above all else, demonstrating how field sketching may be one way to return to the basics of understanding our environment that many of us long for, and find hard to achieve in a digital age.
Catharine Ward Thompson, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh.
